


We Need An Adult

by BetterBeMeta



Category: The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: Adulthood, Elders, Gen, Grandmothers, Humor, What would somebody who's actually a kid do, kings + bullies + grandmothers, power and being 'a real man', the nature of kings, watch out here comes grandma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-16
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-21 02:21:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4811291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetterBeMeta/pseuds/BetterBeMeta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ganondorf snatches his friend Zelda away, Link is understandably upset. He was told he had to grow up too-soon to protect his friends, but when they keep getting taken away anyway and he's powerless to stop it, what was the point?</p><p>If being an adult didn't matter, Link decides he has to find an even more adultier adult to solve this problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Need An Adult

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by ["Ganondorf's Grandmother"](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/145007) by prodzvoices. 



> This short fic was inspired by a hilarious short clip by a very talented voice actor on tumblr-- a what-if when Ganondorf made his big speech at the end of Ocarina of Time he was confronted by his judgmental grandmother. From there, what was intended to be a quick joke kind of got a little bit more serious meaning: the nature of adults and being an adult, the question of Link is really an adult or a 'real man', the relationship of power and adulthood and kingship and what causes Ganondorf to make these speeches, the Gerudo and how they might see kings and power, and the obvious logic that in a society of only women there *must* be an incredibly terrifying grandmother there somewhere.

“Princess Zelda, you foolish traitor!”

The weirdest, worst thing of all was that Sheik (no, Zelda!) didn’t even say anything further while Ganondorf just talked out of the sky. She didn’t bang on the crystal prison, or do anything to escape. Just, she looked surprised. So sad, and scared and shocked that this would happen.

“I commend you for avoiding my pursuit for seven long years. But you let your guard down,” snarled the Evil King’s booming voice. “I knew you would appear if I let this kid wander around!”

Zelda cried out, pulled upward by some invisible string. Link wanted to say something back, tell Ganondorf what he thought of him… he was punishing her!

“My only mistake was to slightly underestimate this kid’s power,” Ganondorf said, though it didn’t sound like he regretted much of anything. No, like he was thinking? Whatever he thought, he yanked poor Zelda up into the air with his magic, leaving Link only able to stare up and feel so small. What good was being big and grown-up if he could still be made to feel this way?

“No… It was not the kid’s power I misjudged,” Ganondorf continued to Zelda, as if Link wasn’t even there. “It was the power of the Triforce of Courage! But with the Triforce of Wisdom, and Triforce of Courage to join it, I will become the true ruler of the world!”

Link thought about yelling something back. But, like always, the words stuck in his throat just when he needed them most. Just like when he was a kid, he was too afraid to say anything. Even after all of that, too scared to…

“If you want to rescue Zelda, come to my castle!”

And after all of that, Zelda was just gone. The Temple of Time went even quieter than it had ever been. Link had said nothing. And the only thing that even acknowledged his existence as anything more than some faraway pest was… it was just a bully’s taunt.

Link sat down on the steps and began to cry.

“Link? Link, he hurt your feelings that bad?”

Navi landed somewhere by his left ear.

“It’s all the same, I hate it! I hate it!” Link said. “Nothing’s changed at-at all… I can fight dragons and… help people but I can’t stop my friends from going away! I still… I still feel too small, and I still don’t know what to do…”

He blew his nose on his hat.

“I hate being a grown-up,” he said. “It’s… it’s not any different. The bullies are still bigger than you, but they just call themselves kings to make it sound more right…”

“What’s the matter? If he takes Zelda away, we can take her back!”

Link shook his head. “No! If I have… If I have the Triforce of Courage, I have to stay away… I can’t let him bully me into bringing him something he wants! Zelda was so brave, she kept the Triforce away from him for seven years. If I can’t do it for five minutes then I’d be a real dummy!”

“But you’ve got to be brave,” Navi whispered. “Zelda’s nice… we can’t just let someone treat her this way…”

Link sniffed, wiped his eyes on his leather glove.

“I know… but I… I don’t know how being brave can help,” Link said. “Being a real man, marching right up there and taking Zelda back, that’s the bully way. I can’t be a bigger bully than Ganondorf, no matter how brave I am. It’s just not possible.”

Link sighed.

“And just staying away, so he can never get the whole Triforce, that would be the smart thing to do,” Link said. “But I’m not smart enough to just… think away how bad Zelda must feel right now. I couldn’t do that…

“So if there’s the strong way, and the smart way, what good is the brave way? What even is that way? There’s just no way I can make it stop…”

Navi hovered, a quiet blue light just before his eyes. “Oh Link… you don’t have to feel you need to do this alone. You’ve still got me, right?”

“Right.”

Link stood up, and began walking. He put his hat on, a little booger-y and crooked now, but still good.

“Where are we going now?”

Link quietly closed the temple door behind him, and then ran down the lane and past the square with the redeads (he didn’t even play the Sun’s Song anymore, running was just easier and better here) and down the ruined lane to the town gate.

“You’re right, Navi. You’re totally right,” he said, puffing. “I don’t have to do it all alone, that’s the difference between then and now. I have… I have friends now!”

“What? But… the sages, they’re…”

“No, Navi! Not the sages,” said Link, finally hitting dirt and brown grass outside the town limit. “When I was a Kokiri kid, there weren’t any adults so I had to do everything myself! Which meant if I couldn’t… couldn’t stop Mido, then I wasn’t a real man…”

Link paused only to stuff the Ocarina’s mouthpiece in his face and tweet out a hasty few notes, and met Epona running as she ran over the hill to see him.

“But Navi! If there was a grown-up around…”

“Link, you’re a grown-up now!”

“I need a grown-uppier grownup!”

\--

And, even though everybody was afraid of them, Link knew that there weren’t any more grown-up grownups than the Gerudo. Besides, there wasn’t going to be any other kind of person that Ganondorf might think would be more grown-up than he was.

There wasn’t even like, any question about it. Any adult in castle town would be like a crying baby next to a Gerudo, any Gerudo. You had to be real grown-up to live in the desert without any help. Everybody else had it easy.

They first laughed at him, when he went right up to a guard and asked to see an adult. Then Navi explained that he didn’t just need a regular grown-up. He needed a very, very grown-up person. Someone who like the Great Deku Tree had been, that was the only way either of them could explain that sort of thing. They took that a little more seriously, even if they found it more poetic than it was supposed to be. Someone who was like a mighty, ancient tree would be really something.

Link understood though when they brought him deep into the Fortress, through doors ascending the mesa to it’s highest rooms. There, cut into the stone was a wide court ankle-deep in furs, occupied by a gnarled throne. It was empty.

Off one side there was a woman that Link had never seen in the Fortress before. Cracks spidered her brown, brown skin. “So you’re this Kid who shook everything up, eh?” she said in her even, sharp voice. When she looked at him, it was with one piercing yellow eye. The other was put out.

She stood to meet him, leaning on a cane. No, her sheathed sword. And though she was old, she walked like she could teach him a thing or two about how to use it. White scars reached up her neck, up to her white hair that only had a few wisps of vivid red still left within. Link felt more sweat than just the desert heat. Link had only seen a few very old people in his entire life, but Link thought she had more in common with the most grizzled Wolfos than the beaky, wrinkled potion seller in Kakariko.

Link swallowed the lump in his throat and began working up the words to say to her.

“Well, you did me a favor, kid. You got rid of Koume and Kotake for me. Maybe now something other than their experiments can happen ‘round here. Shame about Nabooru though. Never blamed her for leaving. Always had her head sewn on right, before what they did to her.”

“She was my friend,” Link said finally.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Link,” said Link. “Uh, what’s yours?”

Really, Link was mostly just terrified of accidentally calling her ‘granny’ or something. But the old woman laughed and laughed, and her gold earrings jingled the whole time. “It’s been a long, long time since someone didn’t know my name around here. I was here before most of them, after all!” She settled down soon, though. “I’m Babakali. You call me Baba though, everybody else does.”

“It’s… nice to meet you, Baba,” Link said.

“We need an adult,” Navi added, probably helpfully.

“Navi, you explain,” Link said, terrified that he’d mix it all up.

And Navi did. For a fairy, she was pretty good at that kind of thing, where Link was pretty terrible at it. And Babakali listened, only slightly weirded out by a fairy from the forest in her fortress. She heard all about Ganondorf, and what he did, and what he’d been doing all over the kingdom, and Zelda, and all the things that had happened outside of the Valley walls. The old woman listened long enough to sit down again, and harrumph and shush for Link also to sit down cross-legged on the cushions before the great throne. She didn’t sit on it. But while Navi told the story, she looked at it in quiet disappointment.

“You must understand, Link. Many of the things that Ganondorf has done are bad, yes.” Babakali said. “But they are little different from what your Hyrulian King has done, to us and others. Kings wage war, cover the land in their armies all through the ages. It is wrong. But he is no Great King of Evil, no matter how he styles himself. He is merely a King, doing what he sees fit to do as King to prove his power. The only difference between him and the King he replaced is that Hyrule did have this Triforce to begin with. And after Ganondorf has the Triforce there will be peace. On his terms, as once the terms were Hyrule’s.”

“But that doesn’t mean…” Navi said. “That doesn’t mean that the right thing to do is to just let him have it!”

“He’s taken away everybody who could tell him to stop,” Link said. “He’s become not just a King. But also a bully.”

“All kings are bullies, kid,” said Babakali. “If you don’t like it, go be a real Hyrule man and take the girl back.”

Link didn’t want to be rude. But he just couldn’t help it. Enough was enough. He had to make this grown-up understand, he just had to, no matter if it could ruin everything or not. He threw down his hat, he yelled, “No! I don’t want to be a real man! Zelda’s not some _thing_ we’re fighting over! She’s her own person, and she gave up everything to keep the Triforce away from Ganondorf! If what Ganondorf is doing is the same as what her family did… she still worked so hard to destroy what he’s trying to become!”

“And put herself back where her father was.”

“No!” Link said. “I won’t let that happen! We have to try…”

Link was beginning to cry. He couldn’t do that, not in front of this grown-up. “We have to try to be better than the people who came before us, Baba,” he said weakly, and wasn’t sure if it held all the importance he wanted it to hold.

Babakali didn’t say much to him until she thought hard about it for a while. That was a big sign of being a grown-up, to Link. But when she spoke, it was some language he didn’t know. She was talking to herself, maybe. Then after another period of silence, she nodded and met his eyes with her one eye.

“That’s very brave of you to say,” she said. “But we here have sayings, too. One of them, which I definitely invented is this: trust no oath until you fulfill it yourself. Pithy, eh?”

Link nodded.

“You can say whatever you like, but it’s all just Hylian promises unless I have a hand in it,” Babakali said. “How about that?”

“Sure,” Link said.

“Besides, I could use some air,” Babakali added. “And my idiot grandson, he never writes, he never visits… I knew from the moment he was born handing him over to those witches was no good. Made him a sorcerer as good as anything and he _still_ doesn’t even bother to use magic and call once in a while…”

Link just nodded, mostly because he had little idea of what a grandmother actually was. Having been raised by a giant sapient tree for much of his childhood he was hazy on just the idea of a regular mother.

\--

Really, Link wasn’t sure why he hadn’t just go found an adult from the very beginning. She had a rather lot to say about the floating castle, and the lava, of course. Things almost as colorful as the very rainbow bridge the sages threw up to reach it. She sat down on a nearby rock and sewed a little as Link ran around opening all the locks downstairs so they could ascend the tower. Each time he passed by she waved a little and offered him a kind of flat biscuit from a leather-wrapped satchel. Navi called them cookies? They were sweetened with ant syrup and honey. They were very good, but for some reason her carrying them around just seemed ominous.

Finally the tower was unlocked and they slowly began walking up the stairs. Every few floors they took a short break, for Babakali’s knees. She said they were fine, though, and waved her sword a little at him every time he worried otherwise. “They don’t call me old Deku Baba because I got legs brittle like sticks, you know!”

“Why do they call you that?” Navi asked.

“Why, I once bit a man’s whole face off,” reminisced Babakali, with a gummy smile.

It was a good thing they’d gotten to the top of the tower by then because Link felt that otherwise she’d begin to tell the whole story right there. Not that Link would have heard much over the loud music playing from the room ahead. But Babakali didn’t seem bothered by it, else might have been slightly deaf.

Ganondorf stopped playing the instrument as they entered, though. And there Zelda was, out like a candle and hanging over the scene like a very bad conversation piece. Something on her was glowing? And Link looked down to his hand, something there was also glowing?

Ganondorf’s smile could be heard in his deep voice, his hungry and cruel derision, “The Triforce parts are resonating…”

“Dorfie, what are you doing all the way up here?” demanded Babakali shrilly, waving her sheathed sword at him. Ganondorf flinched as if someone had thrown a rock at him, coughed, turned around slightly in horror. Then turned back instantly as if he regretted seeing what he’d seen.

“G-Grandmother…”

“You should be home taking care of your sisters!”

When Ganondorf turned around, Link didn’t have to say anything to feel satisfied. The 'great king' and his total humiliation and terror was definitely enough.

“My sisters are fine, Grandmother,” he said exasperatedly. He inched around as if he was going to try the whole thing again and play another refrain.

“You stop playing that piano and come home _this instant_!”

“It’s an _organ_ , Grandmother…”

“And you put that girl down _immediately_! Now, I like to see the end of Hyrulian royalty as much as the next woman, but in _my day_ we treated our nemesis with _respect_! You set her down and have a _nice, respectable duel_ with her, we don’t just hang her on a wall like a barbarian to prove we can!”

“Grandmother, she—”

“Much less send a man to fight in her place! I’m ashamed!”

“ _Please, I—_ ”

“And take off that ratty cape! I could make pants for three girls with that, don’t you just wear it all yourself!”

And that was how Ganondorf’s seven-year reign as Tyrant of Hyrule came to an end. A ceremonial duel with the Princess of Hyrule was arranged to an inevitable draw and co-rulership of the Kingdom of Hyrule was the result. Furthermore and most importantly, that was how Babakali, grandmother and last most stalwart of the Gerudo Council of Elders attained the Triforce of the Gods and promptly ensured every single one of her descendants had food on the table, could go to university, had the strength to destroy men, and always had a clean pair of socks.


End file.
